‘The Northern Ireland (Executive Formation and Exercise of Functions) Bill, which arrives in the House of Lords today, is set to be enacted by way of fast-track legislative procedure this week. The Bill intends to facilitate the formation of an Executive in Northern Ireland while providing for the exercise of executive functions by civil servants in the interim. In effect, the Bill suspends the statutory duty on the Secretary of State to call a Northern Ireland Assembly election. This is little more than a continuation of the present situation in which the UK Government has kept administration in Northern Ireland ticking over since March 2017. Much more controversially, the Bill gives civil servants within Northern Ireland departments general powers for the administration of Northern Ireland, introducing a public interest test for the exercise of these powers.’

‘The Home Office has issued 59 pages of guidance notes to help staff register EU citizens for a post-Brexit scheme that the former home secretary Amber Rudd said would be as easy to apply for as an online account with the clothes retailer LK Bennett.’

‘Civil service unions are seeking a judicial review over the government’s failure to consult on pay. Three unions, representing 200,000 public employees, have accused ministers of never intending to consult staff before offering a new pay cap of 1.5%.’

‘If there is one thing everyone using FOIA is used to, it is the idea that the personal data (names, contact details) of ‘junior civil servants’ will be redacted out of the disclosed information, applying the section 40(2) personal data exemption. Unless there is a good reason not to. But what if everyone is wrong? Is redacting junior civil servants just a personal data shibboleth?’

‘The government immigration agencies at the centre of the Windrush scandal are “rife” with discrimination and harassment, a survey of their own employees reveals.
Official documents show staff at Border Force reporting high levels of discrimination, with almost one in four (23 per cent) saying they had experienced it.’

‘Two recent Court of Appeal decisions raise some interesting constitutional questions about the status of Tribunals in the UK legal system. This post (in two parts) seeks to explore some of the implications and suggests that a key constitutional principle, the separation of powers, has once again been neglected. The two cases are Roszkowski v Secretary State for the Home Department (‘Roszkowski’) and R (Privacy International) v Investigatory Powers Tribunal (‘Privacy International’). Privacy International has received considerably more coverage than Roszkowski and is rumoured to be on the way to the Supreme Court. It has already been addressed on this blog by Thomas Fairclough and elsewhere by Mark Elliott. Roszkowski explores the implications of an important and controversial Supreme Court case, R (Evans) v Attorney General (‘Evans’) and contains some critical comment on the reasoning of Lord Neuberger in that case.’

‘Numbers can be anathema to many lawyers. Yet statistics are a useful weapon in the litigation armoury. This week the Government released its Race Disparity Audit which provides a wealth of such statistics and is a timely reminder of the role that they can play in litigation. Tom Gillie discusses three recent examples of how statistics can be used to advance successful arguments in employment litigation and broader equality context, for example, in relation to the provision of goods, facilities and services.’

‘Freedom of religion and same-sex equality are not inherently incompatible. But sometimes they do seem to be on a collision course. This happens, for instance, when religiously devout marriage officers refuse to marry same-sex couples. In the wake of legal recognition of same-sex marriage around the world, states have grappled with civil servants who cannot reconcile their legal duties with their religious beliefs.’

‘Proposals by the Law Commission to reform the 1989 Official Secrets Act (OSA) could lead to the imprisonment of civil servants and journalists for disclosing information that would be available to anyone asking for it under the Freedom of Information Act, a leading campaigner for freedom of information has said.’

‘Last November the judge decided that the UK’s air pollution plans under EU and domestic laws were not good enough. The case has a long, and unedifying back-story of Government not doing what the law says it should do.’

‘In the joined cases of Essop and Naeem ([2017] UKSC 27) the Supreme Court has taken on a daunting task: the simplification of indirect discrimination law. This is not a case note in the usual sense. We have not set out the facts, the law and then a statement of what is novel. At the hearing we tried to give the Supreme Court a new vocabulary to use as a tool for its analysis. The aim of this note is to explain that language as simply as we can. If we succeed, what we have to say will seem obvious. Those reading Lady Hale’s judgment (with which all of their Lordships agreed) will have had that experience. She has distilled, from an area of law that was submerging into great complexity, a handful of principles that dispel confusion and whch make intractable issues straightforward.’

‘Black immigration officers struggled to pass promotion exams because the tests were racist, a court has heard. A group of 49 Home Office employees is now set to sue the Government over claims that the exams are discriminatory.’

‘Personal data security was breached nearly 9,000 times by the government in a year, the National Audit Office (NAO) has found. The watchdog revealed the 17 largest departments recorded 8,995 data breaches in 2014-15 – but that only 14 were reported to the Information Commissioner (ICO).’

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